Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

by Cormac McCarthy

  Mucho gusto.

  Igualmente, said the sergeant.

  The judge escorted him from one to the next of the company, the sergeant formal and the Americans muttering obscenities or shaking their heads silently. The soldiers squatted on their heels and watched each movement in this charade with the same dull interest and at length the judge hove up before the black.

  That dark vexed face. He studied it and he drew the sergeant forward the better for him to observe and then he began a laborious introduction in Spanish. He sketched for the sergeant a problematic career of the man before them, his hands drafting with a marvelous dexterity the shapes of what varied paths conspired here in the ultimate authority of the extant--as he told them--like strings drawn together through the eye of a ring. He adduced for their consideration references to the children of Ham, the lost tribes of Israelites, certain passages from the Greek poets, anthropological speculations as to the propagation of the races in their dispersion and isolation through the agency of geological cataclysm and an assessment of racial traits with respect to climatic and geographical influences. The sergeant listened to this and more with great attention and when the judge was done he stepped forward and held out his hand.

  Jackson ignored him. He looked at the judge.

  What did you tell him, Holden?

  Dont insult him, man.

  What did you tell him?

  The sergeant's face had clouded. The judge took him about the shoulders and leaned and spoke into his ear and the sergeant nodded and stepped back and saluted the black.

  What did you tell him, Holden?

  That shaking hands was not the custom in your land.

  Before that. What did you say to him before that.

  The judge smiled. It is not necessary, he said, that the principals here be in possession of the facts concerning their case, for their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding. But it is consistent with notions of right principle that these facts--to the extent that they can be readily made to do so--should find a repository in the witness of some third party. Sergeant Aguilar is just such a party and any slight to his office is but a secondary consideration when compared to divergences in that larger protocol exacted by the formal agenda of an absolute destiny. Words are things. The words he is in possession of he cannot be deprived of. Their authority transcends his ignorance of their meaning.

  The black was sweating. A dark vein in his temple pulsed like a fuse. The company had listened to the judge in silence. A few smiled. A halfwitted killer from Missouri guffawed softly like an asthmatic. The judge turned again to the sergeant and they spoke together and the judge and he crossed to where the crate stood in the courtyard and the judge showed him one of the pistols and explained its workings with great patience. The sergeant's men had risen and stood waiting. At the gate the judge doled coins into Aguilar's palm and he shook hands formally with each ragged charge and complimented them upon their military bearing and they exited into the street.

  At noon that day the partisans rode out each man armed with a pair of the pistols and took the road upcountry as told.

  The outriders returned in the evening and the men dismounted for the first time that day and recruited their horses in the sparse swale while Glanton conferred with the scouts. Then they rode on until dark and made camp. Toadvine and the veteran and the kid squatted at a small remove from the fires. They did not know that they were set forth in that company in the place of three men slain in the desert. They watched the Delawares, of whom there were a number in the party, and they too sat somewhat apart, crouched on their heels, one pounding coffeebeans in a buckskin with a rock while the others stared into the fire with eyes as black as gunbores. That night the kid would see one of them sort with his hand among the absolute embers for a right coal with which to light his pipe.

  They were about in the morning before daybreak and they caught up and saddled their mounts as soon as it was light enough to see. The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning. As the riders came up through the mesquite and pyracantha singlefile in a light clank of arms and chink of bitrings the sun climbed and the moon set and the horses and the dewsoaked mules commenced to steam in flesh and in shadow.

  Toadvine had fallen in with a fugitive from Vandiemen's Land named Bathcat who had come west on legbail. He was from Wales by birth and he had but three fingers to his right hand and few teeth. Perhaps he saw in Toadvine a fellow fugitive--an earless and branded felon who had chosen in life much as had he--and he offered to wager as to which Jackson would kill which.

  I dont know them boys, said Toadvine.

  How do ye think then?

  Toadvine spat quietly to one side and looked at the man. I wouldnt want to bet, he said.

  Not a gaming man?

  Depends on the game.

  The blackie will do for him. Take your odds.

  Toadvine looked at him. The necklace of human ears he wore looked like a string of dried black figs. He was big and rawlooking and one eyelid sagged where a knife had severed the small muscles there and he was furnished with gear of every class, the fine with the shoddy. He wore good boots and he carried a handsome rifle bound with german silver but the rifle was slung in a cutoff bootleg and his shirt was in tatters and his hat rancid.

  Ye've not hunted the aborigines afore, said Bathcat.

  Who says it?

  I know it.

  Toadvine didnt answer.

  You'll find em right lively.

  So I hear.

  The Vandiemenlander smiled. Much is changed, he said. When I first come into this country there was savages up on the San Saba had hardly seen white men. They come into our camp and we shared our mess with em and they couldnt keep their eyes off our knives. Next day they brought whole strings of horses into camp to trade. We didnt know what they wanted. They had knives of their own, such as they was. But what it was, you see, was they'd never seen sawed bones in a stew before.

  Toadvine glanced at the man's forehead but the man's hat was pushed down almost to his eyes. The man smiled and forked the hat back slightly with his thumb. The print of the hatband lay on his forehead like a scar but there was no mark other. Only on the inside of his lower arm was there tattooed a number which Toadvine would see in a Chihuahua bathhouse and again when he would cut down the man's torso where it hung skewered by its heels from a treelimb in the wastes of Pimeria Alta in the fall of that year.

  They rode up through cholla and nopal, a dwarf forest of spined things, through a stone gap in the mountains and down among blooming artemisia and aloe. They crossed a broad plain of desert grass dotted with palmilla. On the slopes were gray stone walls that followed the ridgelines down to where they lay broached and tumbled upon the plain. They did not noon nor did they siesta and the cotton eye of the moon squatted at broad day in the throat of the mountains to the east and they were still riding when it overtook them at its midnight meridian, sketching on the plain below a blue cameo of such dread pilgrims clanking north.

  They spent the night in the corral of a hacienda where all night men kept watchfires burning on the azoteas or roofs. Two weeks before this a party of campesinos had been hacked to death with their own hoes and partly eaten by hogs while the Apaches rounded up what stock would drive and disappeared into the hills. Glanton ordered a goat killed and this was done in the corral while the horses shied and trembled and in the flaring light of the fires the men squatted and roasted the meat and ate it with knives and wiped their fingers in their hair and turned in to sleep upon the beaten clay.

  At dusk of the third day they rode into the town of Corralitos, the horses shuffling through the caked ash and the sun glaring redly through the smoke. The smelter chimneys were range
d against an ashen sky and the globy lights of the furnaces glowered under the dark of the hills. It had rained in the day and the windowlights of the low mud houses were reflected in pools along the flooded road out of which great dripping swine rose moaning before the advancing horses like oafish demons routed from a fen. The houses were loopholed and parapeted and the air was filled with the fumes of arsenic. The people had turned out to see the Texans, they called them, standing solemnly along the way and noting the least of their gestures with looks of awe, looks of wonder.

  They camped in the plaza, blackening the cottonwoods with their fires and driving forth the sleeping birds, the flames lighting up the wretched town to its darkest pens and bringing forth even the blind tottering with their hands outstretched toward that conjectural day. Glanton and the judge with the Brown brothers rode out to the hacienda of General Zuloaga where they were received and given their dinner and the night passed without incident.

  In the morning when they had saddled their mounts and were assembled in the square to ride out they were approached by a family of itinerant magicians seeking safe passage upcountry as far as Janos. Glanton looked down at them from his place at the head of the column. Their goods were piled up in tattered panniers lashed to the backs of three burros and they were a man and his wife and a grown boy and a girl. They were dressed in fools costumes with stars and halfmoons embroidered on and the once gaudy colors were faded and pale from the dust of the road and they looked a set of right wander-folk cast on this evil terrain. The old man came forward and took the bridle of Glanton's horse.

  Get your hands off the horse, said Glanton.

  He spoke no english but he did as he was told. He commenced to put forth his case. He gestured, he pointed back toward the others. Glanton watched him, who knows if he heard at all. He turned and looked at the boy and at the two women and he looked down at the man again.

  What are you? he said.

  The man held his ear toward Glanton and looked up with mouth agape.

  I said what are you? Are you a show?

  He looked back toward the others.

  A show, said Glanton. Bufones.

  The man's face brightened. Si, he said. Si, bufones. Todo. He turned to the boy. Casimero! Los perros!

  The boy ran to one of the burros and began to tug among the packings. He came up with a pair of bald and bat-eared animals slightly larger than rats and pale brown in color and he pitched them into the air and caught them on the palms of his hands where they began to pirouette mindlessly.

  Mire, mire! called the man. He was fishing about in his pockets and soon he was juggling four small wooden balls in front of Glanton's horse. The horse snorted and lifted its head and Glanton leaned over the saddle and spat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  Aint that the drizzlin shits, he said.

  The man was juggling and calling back over his shoulder to the women and the dogs were dancing and the women were turning to in preparation of something when Glanton spoke to the man.

  Dont start no more of that crazy shit. You want to ride with us you fall in in the back. I promise you nothin. Vamonos.

  He rode on. The company clanked into motion and the juggler ran shooing the women toward the burros and the boy stood wide-eyed with the dogs under his arm until the man spoke to him. They rode out through the rabble past great cones of slag and tailings. The people watched them go. Some of the men stood hand in hand like lovers and a small child led forth a blind man on a string to a place of vantage.

  At noon they crossed the stony bottom of the Casas Grandes River and they rode along a benchland above the gaunt rill of water past a place of bones where Mexican soldiers had slaughtered an encampment of Apaches some years gone, women and children, the bones and skulls scattered along the bench for half a mile and the tiny limbs and toothless paper skulls of infants like the ossature of small apes at their place of murder and old remnants of weathered basketry and broken pots among the gravel. They rode on. The river led a limegreen corridor of trees down out of the barren mountains. To the west lay the ragged Carcaj and to the north the Animas peaks dim and blue.

  They made camp that night on a windy plateau among pinon and juniper and the fires leaned downwind in the darkness and hot chains of sparks raced among the scrub. The jugglers unloaded the burros and began to set up a large gray tent. The canvas was scrawled with arcana and it flapped and lurched, stood towering, luffed and wrapped them about. The girl lay on the ground holding to one corner. She began to drag through the sand. The juggler took small steps. The woman's eyes were rigid in the light. As the company watched the four of them all clutched to the snapping cloth were towed mutely from sight beyond the reach of the firelight and into the howling desert like supplicants at the skirts of some wild and irate goddess.

  The pickets saw the tent lumber horribly away into the night. When the family of jugglers returned they were arguing among themselves and the man went again to the edge of the firelight and peered out upon the wrathful blackness and spoke to it and gestured with his fist nor would he return until the woman sent the boy to fetch him. Now he sat staring at the flames while the family unpacked. They watched him uneasily. Glanton watched him also.

  Showman, he said.

  The juggler looked up. He put one finger to his chest.

  You, said Glanton.

  He rose and shuffled forward. Glanton was smoking a slender black cigar. He looked up at the juggler.

  You tell fortunes?

  The juggler's eyes skittered. Como? he said.

  Glanton put the cigar in his mouth and mimed a deal of cards with his hands. La baraja, he said. Para adivinar la suerte.

  The juggler tossed one hand aloft. Si, si, he said, shaking his head with vigor. Todo, todo. He held up one finger and then turned and made his way to the trove of shoddy partly offloaded from the burros. When he returned he was smiling affably and manipulating the cards very nimbly.

  Venga, he called. Venga.

  The woman followed him. The juggler squatted before Glanton and spoke to him in a low voice. He turned and looked at the woman and he riffled the cards and rose and took her by the hand and led her over the ground away from the fire and seated her facing out into the night. She swept up her skirt and composed herself and he took from his shirt a kerchief and with it bound her eyes.

  Bueno, he called. Puedes ver?

  No.

  Nada?

  Nada, said the woman.

  Bueno, said the juggler.

  He turned with the deck of cards and advanced toward Glanton. The woman sat like a stone. Glanton waved him away.

  Los caballeros, he said.

  The juggler turned. The black was squatting by the fire watching and when the juggler fanned the cards he rose and came forward.

  The juggler looked up at him. He folded the cards and fanned them again and he made a pass over them with his left hand and held them forth and Jackson took a card and looked at it.

  Bueno, said the juggler. Bueno. He admonished caution with a forefinger to his thin lips and took the card and held it aloft and turned with it. The card popped once sharply. He looked at the company seated about the fire. They were smoking, they were watching. He made a slow sweep before him with the card outheld. It bore the picture of a fool in harlequin and a cat. El tonto, he called.

  El tonto, said the woman. She raised her chin slightly and she began a singsong chant. The dark querent stood solemnly, like a man arraigned. His eyes shifted over the company. The judge sat upwind from the fire naked to the waist, himself like some great pale deity, and when the black's eyes reached his he smiled. The woman ceased. The fire fled down the wind.

  Quien, quien, cried the juggler.

  She paused. El negro, she said.

  El negro, cried the juggler, turning with the card. His clothes snapped in the wind. The woman raised her voice and spoke again and the black turned to his mates.

  What does she say?

  The juggler had turned
and was making small bows to the company.

  What does she say? Tobin?

  The expriest shook his head. Idolatry, Blackie, idolatry. Do not mind her.

  What does she say Judge?

  The judge smiled. With his thumb he had been routing small life from the folds of his hairless skin and now he held up one hand with the thumb and forefinger pressed together in a gesture that appeared to be a benediction until he flung something unseen into the fire before him. What does she say?

  What does she say.

  I think she means to say that in your fortune lie our fortunes all.

  And what is that fortune?

  The judge smiled blandly, his pleated brow not unlike a dolphin's. Are you a drinking man, Jackie?

  No more than some.

  I think she'd have you beware the demon rum. Prudent counsel enough, what do you think?

  That aint no fortune.

  Exactly so. The priest is right.

  The black frowned at the judge but the judge leaned forward to regard him. Wrinkle not thy sable brow at me, my friend. All will be known to you at last. To you as to every man.

  Now a number of the company seated there seemed to weigh the judge's words and some turned to look at the black. He stood an uneasy honoree and at length he stepped back from the firelight and the juggler rose and made a motion with the cards, sweeping them in a fan before him and then proceeding along the perimeter past the boots of the men with the cards outheld as if they would find their own subject.

  Quien, quien, he whispered among them.

  They were right loath all. When he came before the judge the judge, who sat with one hand splayed across the broad expanse of his stomach, raised a finger and pointed.

  Young Blasarius yonder, he said.

  Como?

  El joven.

  El joven, whispered the juggler. He looked about him slowly with an air of mystery until he found with his eyes the one so spoken. He moved past the adventurers quickening his step. He stood before the kid, he squatted with the cards and fanned them with a slow rhythmic motion akin to the movements of certain birds at court.

  Una carta, una carta, he wheezed.

  The kid looked at the man and he looked at the company about.

  Si, si, said the juggler, offering the cards.